Stock Market Project

We were asked to go to the Virtual Stock Exchange website and join a stock trading game. We were given $100,000 to play with and required to select a minimum of 12 companies to purchase stock with. Each transaction comes with a $9.95 commission charge. Since I began selecting my stocks on Sunday when the market was closed, I was unable to view my portfolio to keep track of my spending. To ensure that I didn't go over my limit, I tried to spend approximately $8,000 per stock and I created a Google spreadsheet to track the start values of the stock. While I don't think I will track my stocks daily, I do think that I will come back to this at the end to see how each stock has changed. I thought this was a good mental math activity to do with students as I found myself mentally calculating about how many shares I need to buy to get close to the $8,000 mark. I also think this would be useful to use in my math class to talk about percent of change, percent of increase, and percent of decrease.